Heeej!
David and I went to our getaway house for a few days and the day before yesterday I took photos of our entire day. It was such a great day!

Slept in, like most days here. Breakfast was two avocado toasts with lime, salt and pepper, and a couple of cups of coffee with milk.

Then I found myself in a glass vase.

After that we went to the beach. I spent many many summer days when I was a kid at this exact beach. We used to rent a house in the fishing village Vik, that this beach is part of, for two weeks every summer.
Vik holds a special place in my heart.

It was the most wonderful day! The sun was shining brightly and felt warm on our cheeks, the sea was calm unlike most winter days we've been here before, and I was so very, very happy to be there.

Such a happy gal!
By the way, I think I look very much like my mother in this photo. There is a photo from a couple of years before I was born when my parents were dating. It's the end of the 70s I think, they certainly are dressed like it anyway, and they are on a picnic together, just the two of them. In the photo my mother is smiling brightly and lovingly with a boiled egg in her hand, and this reminds me of that. I think it's partly because my hair in this photo looks like her shorter hairdo did back then.

If you walk by the sea here you'll cross everything from beaches with stones all over, huge cliffs, large rocks like this and then you reach the sandy beach. That's one of the awesome things with Vik. The nature changes for every step you take and it's breathtakingly beautiful every bit of the way.

It's important to make time to step from stone to stone a little when you're here.

I was matching the surroundings perfectly that day in my grandmother's old suede coat, a thrifted velvet skirt and a circle scarf bought at an outdoors market in Amsterdam a few years ago.

Footsteps in the sand. Both human and dog feet.

Found a perfectly situated bench. Felt like I sat in a painting.

Hej!

And hi to David who was photobombing in an very cute way.

We strolled up from the beach to the footpath because our walk wasn't finished yet.
And this, by the way, is a recurring thing when David and I are out walking: I stop to take pictures of something interesting I see along the path and when I look up David is far ahead. Oh, that looks kinda nice; let's take a photo of him walking. Oh! Now he's even farther away! David! Wait for me!
Repeat over and over again.

Our next stop on our walk was this old bunker.

Inside it looks tidier than you would imagine. The door David is going through leads to a pitch dark circular room. You can see more of that room (and me with demon eyes) here.

Ah, daylight!

We were on our way to a really cool abandoned house. Not this one though. This is a fishing shed.
But the house we wanted to see turned out to be gone. So gone that you couldn't even see a trace of where it used to stand.
We went into it in 2009 and took some photos and it was so amazing! A newspaper from the same year we were born (1981), cups from the 70's left to dry on the kitchen counter and old containers for products that have changed designs many, many times since.
So dissapointing that it's not there anymore. We had plans for that house!

The large tree is an alm tree. Almost every alm in this part of Sweden is dead like this one. They all caught a disease many years ago and the ones that are still standing look like this. Beautiful and somewhat scary tree skeletons.

When we walked back to the car we could feel a change in the wind. It got quiet. And a bit darker. Like rain was on its way.
And the ocean looked bluer than ever.
When we drove by from afar we could see rain pouring down on the sea where we just were. And the roads were wet like it had just rained where we were driving. I love that we missed it by minutes just by walking in the right places when the rain was elsewhere in the area around us.

When we got back to the house we were tired from all the sun and air. I even got some new freckles!
We ate some fish stew left over from the day before, and then I had coffee and instagrammed some photos from the beach.

Then we squeezed together in the sofa and slept like this for an hour.

In the evening we lit the fireplace and a bunch of candles and cozied up under blankets in the livingroom.
I ate knäckebröd with mackerel in tomato sauce. The most Swedish thing to eat ever, I would say. So tasty. But apparently it's an aquired taste because people outside of Sweden seem to think it's disgusting. Well, they're wrong. It's amazing.

Then we played Backgammon. Lots of Backgammon.
David is thinking very hard in this picture.

And this is me in strategy planning mode.

And that was tuesday. A great tuesday.

Hope you liked to tag along.

Until next time:

Tjingeling!
/Lotta

Hej!
Am I back from the stupid cold now? I frickin' hope so!
I thought I was cured on monday. Silly me. After working a day and hanging out with a friend one evening and also going for a walk it was like my body was screaming STOP HURTING ME I'M NOT WELL YET! So the day after, it started all over again.
So the quiestion is; am I back to health now? Who bloody knows!

Since I haven't been outdoors much in like, forever, I have been looking at photos from late january and early february when I actually was a very outdoorsy version of myself.
I realised I had quite a lot of photos I wanted to blog so here they are. In a post that shows how different winter in Sweden can be from day to day.

We'll start this post by going back to the end of january when David and I went to Österlen for a few days. Österlen is a part of the very south of Sweden. We always try to visit the sea at least once every time we go to Österlen because it looks so different every season.
This day the waves were rolling in, the water was high and it was windy and not very pleasant. But the nature looked awesome! Like a movie set! the colours, the textures, the mood; I love it!

It was David's birthday and we had planned to stay indoors for the rest of the day and eat cardemom buns (that I made as birthday gift for David) in front of the fire and play videogames. But before that we wanted to get a bit of air and adventure.

In the summer- green reed, standing proudly, waving in the air.
In the winter- yellow brown, wet hair on the swamplike ground.

When I edited these two photos I spent at least five minutes just staring at the colours, zooming in to look at the blury perfection in the back and the sharp tree branches in the front. It's music to my eyes.
And also. Anyone else thinking of the incredibly sad scene in the Neverending Story when Artax dies?

That moment when the wave is curling in on itself.

One day we woke up to frost.

We were going to Simrishamn to have breakfast at a café we visit at least once everytime we're at Österlen. When we got there the frost had already melted away. This is Simrishamn by the way. Cutest town ever.

And the morning when we were going back to Gothenburg again I looked out the window and saw that the world was covered in a layer of ice crystals. I ran out to snap some photos, of course!

Everything is pretty in a layer of ice crystals!

And now for the snowy part of Swedish winter weather.
I already showed you some photos from early in february when David and I went to the forest Iglekärrs gammelskog in hope of making a film. I had my camera around the neck as part of the character I was going to play so it was inevitable that I would snap photos of everything that day.
Let's take a look at a bunch of those, shall we?

It was very cold. As you can see on David's hands here.
He couldn't wear his gloves most of the time because of the touch screen on the camera and also because it's impossible to press tiny buttons when wearing thick gloves.
We were very brave against the cold that day.

David, the camera monster.

Can't get over how much snow it was that day!

And off he goes into the woods.

I think this was the second day we came here. When it no longer was freezing temperatures and snow melted from the trees and landed everywhere around us with a thump.

The lens fogged up a little. Then it looks like this.

And here I am, running through the forest with my cape dancing behind me.
(Unlike Madonna, I know how to move around with a cape without falling. Just saying...)

And that was that. Four different kinds of Swedish winter weather in one post.

And I prefer none of them. But they look quite pretty on photo, don't they?

Tjingeling!
/Lotta

Hey!
I've been dancing again!
This time I actually returned to the very same forest where I shot the last (and very first) installment of A Lotta Dancing but these two photos carry an entirely different mood.
I'm madly in love with the first one. It took a lot of tries to get the cape to move that way, exactly when the camera shutter went off. But it was so worth it, don't you think?

Rotvälta means uprooted tree and is pronounced a little bit like rootvelt-ah. Haha, so hard to try and spell how it might sound to non-Swedes.

Free style dancing to the humming in my head.

I actually have another installment in this series ready, taken this last summer so I might show you that when the longing for green nature is at its strongest. So very soon, I guess.

Yesterday David and I went to the woods.
We had two things planned for the day.

1. Film a little thing that I will show you next week probably. Not a short film. One of my own projects.
2. Take self portraits for my series A Lotta Dancing.

So that's what happened. I took some photos while we were there just because the woods look absolutely magical this time of year. They actually look magical all year round but, you get what I mean.
Anyways, here's a little behind the scenes/spooky nature romanticism photos for you.

The colours here just blow me away.

We had to walk a little to reach our destination.

There, in the darkness.

Rotvälta. My favourite swedish word. It means uprooted tree.

And there was a quiet woodland lake.

My vintage nurse cape had a big part in the filming and photo shoot. You'll see, in a few days.

Two hours later. Wet and cold feet, tired and very hungry. Time to pack up and go home.

Walked back through the beautiful beech tree forest.

Spent the evening eating good food, getting warm under blankets, drinking tea and playing videogames in front of the crackling fireplace.

Cozy, is the word I'm looking for.

/Lotta